It’s always important to gauge floors versus ceilings when looking at draft prospects. In the first round, most teams are looking for the rare talents who provide both a high floor and ceiling so they can contribute early and scale into the future. Sometimes the ceilings are too high to ignore, and teams will gamble on what a player might become regardless of what they currently are. Nobody fits that description better than Jalen Milroe. The Steelers have shown interest in him, but are they willing to roll the dice?
Daniel Jeremiah laid out a compelling case that several NFL teams – including the Steelers – are probably mulling behind closed doors leading up to the draft.
“He is an elite, elite, elite runner,” Jeremiah said during his annual pre-draft conference call with the media. “He is dynamic. He can make you miss, he can break tackles, there is zero question that he’s gonna have an impact with the ball under his arm.
“If you want to just take a lottery ticket that you could hit huge on, if it all works out and it all comes together, he’s got the highest upside of anybody in this draft, and that goes all the way up to Cam Ward at No. 1. But he’s a long way from getting there.”
Jeremiah called him a classic second-round pick because his floor is also quite low as a starting quarterback. Most teams don’t want to risk a first-round pick on that. The issue with the Steelers is that they don’t have a second-round pick. If they like Milroe they are more than likely going to need to draft him in the first round at No. 21 overall.
The league must think he’s getting drafted on Day 1 because he will be in attendance next Thursday for the first night of the event.
What downsides would the Steelers be contending with?
“He’s not consistently connected between his eyes and his feet. That impacts his accuracy,” Jeremiah said. “Being in a little different system this year, that didn’t go quite as smoothly as you would’ve hoped. I do think he needs time. I do think he requires patience…As a runner, he’s as impressive as Lamar Jackson was as a runner coming out. Lamar was light years ahead of him in terms of the passing game at that point in time.”
It took some time for Jackson to develop into the passer he is now, and he had more to work with in that regard coming out of college. Is it worth betting on Milroe making the same year-by-year progression and on a steeper curve because he’s starting at a deficit?
The Steelers had a Pro Day dinner with him, and they also spoke with him at the Senior Bowl in January. For what it’s worth FS1’s Colin Cowherd said he heard from an executive that the Steelers really like Milroe and would draft him in the first round.
The Steelers are well behind in the AFC quarterback arms race, and a lottery ticket could be one of the best ways to close that gap. But it could also be the next step toward falling completely out of relevancy.
Check out our full scouting report on Milroe below.
